Archive for ‘Ecology’

Another Chinese city has capped the total number of car licence plates it will issue annually, state media said Sunday, following moves by Beijing and other metropolises to curb pollution and congestion.

The world’s most populous nation is also the world’s largest car-buyer. But it is trying to curb poor air quality and other environmental damages caused by rapid development.

Tianjin, a coastal city near Beijing with 14 million people and 2.36 million registered motor vehicles last year, will cap new car plates to 100,000 a year, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The government will award 60,000 plates by lottery, reserving 10,000 of these for fuel-efficient cars, and auction the remaining 40,000.

Of the total plates issued, 88 per cent will go to individuals and the rest to companies and other entities, while government bodies will be ineligible, Xinhua said.

Although the details were reported over the weekend, the policy was announced a week earlier and took effect five hours later, sparking “overnight panic buying”, it added.

Four other cities — Beijing, the commercial hub of Shanghai, Guiyang in the southwest and Guangzhou in the south — have imposed similar restrictions.

Beijing, whose population tops 20 million, launched a lottery system in 2011 for an annual maximum of 240,000 car registrations.

The capital has more than 5.3 million cars on the road, Xinhua said. Demand is so high that applicants have just a 1 in 80 chance, the China Daily newspaper said in October.

Guangzhou last year capped registration for small- and medium-sized cars at 120,000. The city of 16 million people had about 2.4 million cars on the road as of May, local media reported at the time.

Starting next March, Tianjin will also restrict a fifth of private vehicles from using the road on workdays depending on their plate number — a practice first introduced in Beijing in 2008.

With an average altitude of 4,000 meters, Sanjiangyuan, which means \”source of three rivers\” in Chinese, lies in the hinterland of west China\’s Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and is home to China\’s biggest and highest wetlands ecosystem. (The place where the world famous Yangtse, Yellow and Lantsang originate.)

A newly-approved protection plan for the region aims to expand the rehabilitation area from 152,000 to 395,000 square kilometers, according to a statement released after Wednesday\’s executive meeting of the State Council, the country\’s Cabinet, presided over by Premier Li Keqiang.

According to the plan, efforts will focus on protecting and rehabilitating vegetation in the area while improving a monitoring and warning network for local ecological conditions.

Meanwhile, a separate plan on lakes whose water quality are relatively sound was also approved at the meeting. It called for adjusting the industrial structure and distribution in major lake areas and strengthened pollution control of rivers that flow into these lakes.

The statement encouraged strengthened scientific management, wider use of proper technology and the strictest source protection rules, calling for greater government investment and a balance among environmental protection, economic development and people\’s livelihoods.

Also at the meeting, a report was delivered on combating sandstorms in Beijing and Tianjin, urging more forestation subsidies from the central government and a responsibility pursuit system for forests management.

\”Unapproved tree felling, land reclamation, farming, digging and the use of water resources in the forested areas must be strictly cracked down on,\” said the statement.

In addition, the meeting approved a blueprint on establishing a multifunction ecological experimentation zone in northwest China\’s Gansu Province that incorporates water saving, ecological protection, industrial restructuring, resettlement of residents and poverty relief.

China\’s capital Beijing, regularly shrouded in hazardousair pollution, plans to replace its oil-burning buses with greener models by 2017 to help clear the smog, state news agency Xinhua said.

Nearly 14,000 new buses powered by electricity or natural gas will be bought to replace two-thirds of Beijing\’s bus fleet and halve carbon emissions, Xinhua said on Thursday, citing the city\’s environment and transportation authorities.

Air pollution in Beijing hit unprecedented levels in January when an index measuring particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) shot up to a staggering 755 – 38 times the level recommended by the World Health Organisation.

China\’s worsening air quality is a result of it chasing economic growth at all cost in the past 30 years, a pursuit that turned it into the world\’s second-biggest economy, but which also poisoned much of its air, water and soil.

Rising public concern over the health dangers of China\’s air pollution has worried its stability-obsessed leaders, who fear the issue may become a rallying point for wider dissatisfaction.

China has adopted an emergency response program to try to reduce the pollution, including alternating days for cars with odd and even license plates to be on the road and closing schools when the smog is particularly heavy.

China’s pollution problem is spreading and growing worse, a fact on stark display last week in Shanghai, the country’s financial center. A stretch of filthy-air days in that coastal city so thoroughly shocked residents—who had largely escaped the smog that has long plagued the likes of Beijing and Harbin—that it inspired fresh talk about getting away from China.

Over the past century, migration has almost always been driven by a desire to get ahead. But today more affluent Chinese are talking about accepting a climb-down on the career ladder and a less-exciting lifestyle in exchange for cleaner air, safer food and a different education system.

China’s civil aviation regulator has set new rules mandating senior airline pilots operating on major routes into Beijing’s airport be certified to land aircraft under very low visibility, a move to help ease the nation’s worsening air traffic bottlenecks amid often heavy pollution.

China’s major airlines say they have been giving pilots additional training to comply with the new rules, which take effect Jan. 1, according to the carriers and state media.

The decision comes amid worsening pollution across China cities that at times is affecting commercial airline traffic. Last week, thick smog enveloped Shanghai and parts of eastern China, cutting visibility in the city of Nanjing to less than 50 meters and resulting in many flight delays and cancellations.

Thick smog impacting visibility has also caused cancellations and delays at Beijing Capital International Airport, the nation’s busiest and worst in terms of on-time performance, with only 45% of flights departing on time in November, according to travel industry monitor FlightStats.

Depending on weather conditions and runway infrastructure, modern jetliners have sophisticated instruments to help them land in little or no visibility, such as foggy conditions. Pilots, though, need additional certification to perform such approaches, which usually don’t compromise safety. Airlines have varying rules on minimum visibility levels acceptable for landing, though low-visibility landings are frequently done by major airlines in the West.

The special certification for pilots to make low-visibility landings, a common international requirement, applies to situations where visibility drops to 350 meters or less.

Commentaries by two of China\’s most influential news outlets suggesting that the country\’s air pollution crisis was not without a silver lining drew a withering reaction on Tuesday from internet users and other media.

In online commentaries on Monday, state broadcaster CCTV and the widely read tabloid the Global Times, published by the Communist Party\’s official People\’s Daily, both tried to put a positive spin on China\’s smog problem.

The Global Times said smog could be useful in military situations, as it could hinder the use of guided missiles, while CCTV listed five \”unforeseen rewards\” for smog, including helping Chinese people\’s sense of humor.

China must find a way different from the industrialization in the West to build ecological civilization and realize sustainable development, which concerns the future of both the nation and the world.

After solving the food and clothing problems of its 1.3 billion people, the world\’s second-largest economy has encountered a bottleneck as its fast growth has led to adverse side effects for the ecological environment.

He said China started to adopt measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions when its GDP per capita reached 3,000 dollars.

Besides, factors such as the international division of labor led to China receiving many polluting industries from developed countries. Few chances remain for China to transfer these sectors abroad.

With the coexistence of insufficient development and accompanying side effects, tackling pollution in China and many other developing countries requires more determination and courage than required of developed countries.

In China, building ecological civilization has been elevated to a high level of state will and strategy.

The 18th CPC National Congress in 2012 incorporated building ecological civilization into the overall development plan, while the just-concluded Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee made clear arrangements for deepening the institutional reform of ecological civilization.

China will launch two new pilot carbon trading schemes this week in Beijing and Shanghai as it strives to cut soaring rates of greenhouse gas, reduce choking smog and determine the best system for a nationwide roll-out.

China, the world\’s biggest source of climate-changing carbon emissions, is under domestic pressure from its population to counter air pollution and has pledged to cut the 2005 rate of CO2 emissions per unit of GDP growth by 40-45 percent by 2020.

As U.N.-led climate talks stumbled in Warsaw last week, the country\’s chief negotiator Xie Zhenhua was keen to push the country\’s CO2 cutting credentials, challenging developed nations to match the efforts being made by China to tackle global warming.

The new platforms, which will force industrial firms to buy credits to cover any CO2 they emit above allocated quotas, also underscore Beijing\’s commitment to \”market mechanisms\” to slow emissions growth, in line with an ambitious raft of reforms outlined earlier this month.

\”It is definitely a move in the right direction, but there are concerns about activity — these are pilot schemes and are used as a learning experience, and local governments might not be particularly concerned by volumes,\” said Shawn He, a climate lawyer with the Hualian legal practice in Beijing.

Trading is likely to start slowly as the government treads cautiously and tries to learn lessons from Europe, where an excess of credits has left carbon prices in the doldrums.

Hualian\’s He said there were concerns how effective the pilot schemes would be, as no binding carbon caps would be imposed on enterprises and there were no legal means of forcing them to participate.

The gas will power some of Beijing\’s central heating systems in the harsh winter months, replacing coal to cut harmful emissions of particulate pollutants.

When the pipes are fully pumping next year, Beijing will receive 4 billion cubic metres of synthetic gas a year – nearly half of last year\’s natural gas consumption – a step towards switching all the city\’s heating systems and industrial boilers from coal to gas.

But there is an ominous tinge to the seemingly green investment: environmental experts say the water-intensive conversion process could drain already scarce water resources in the country\’s drylands in the northwest, eroding land and causing more sandstorms.

\”If water depletion continues … not only will the local people suffer, the environmental impact could be profound,\” Chinese Academy of Sciences ecology researcher Xie Yan says.

Nationwide, replacing dirty coal with cleaner natural gas is a key measure in reducing the choking smog that spreads over more than a quarter of the country and is inhaled by nearly 600 million people. Because of the country\’s limited conventional natural gas and abundant coal reserves, converting coal to natural gas seems a convenient choice.

Beijing\’s demand for natural gas is expected to rise rapidly, reaching 18 billion tonnes in 2015 and 28 billion tonnes in 2020, as all its heating systems and industrial boilers make the switch from coal to gas. Beijing Gas Group, which is fully owned by the municipal government, has invested in the coal-to-gas project in Inner Mongolia to meet the demand.

The coal-to-gas industry, which had been sputtering for several years, received a boost in September when the State Council released a national action plan to fight air pollution, giving the sector explicit support.

But ecological experts have voiced concern for the unintended environmental consequence of coal-to-gas plants. The conversion requires vast quantities of water not just for production, but also for cooling and the removal of contaminants. On average, one cubic metre of synthetic natural gas needs six to 10 tonnes of freshwater.

\”Freshwater is a key raw material for turning coal to gas, so it\’s impossible to reduce water demand in such projects,\” Wen Hua, an associate at the US-based World Resources Institute (WRI), says.

To make things worse, the coal-abundant northwest, where the gas projects are based, already experiences chronic water shortages. Five provinces – Shanxi , Shaanxi , Ningxia , Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang – which possess 76 per cent of the country\’s coal reserves, have just 6.14 per cent of its total water resources.

China has earned a reputation as the world’s worst polluter. But if the International Energy Agency is right, the Asian nation is on course to set an example for the rest of the planet on the use of energy from renewable sources over the next quarter-century.

According to the Paris-based agency’s World Energy Outlook, China will add more electricity generating capacity from renewable sources by 2035 than the U.S., Europe, and Japan combined. Hydro power and wind power will be the two main sources of China’s renewably sourced electricity, with solar photovoltaic cells coming in a distant third, according to the agency’s forecast. (Sorry, no link to the outlook: The IEA charges €120 ($162) for a paper copy.)

China is predicted to add more electricity generating capacity from renewable sources by 2035 than the U.S., Europe, and Japan combined.

These forecasts for China are from the agency’s central scenario, which assumes “cautious” implementation of policies that have been announced by governments but not put into effect as of mid-2013. The agency has two other scenarios, one assuming no new policies are enacted and another assuming drastic action against global warming that gives the world “a 50 percent chance of keeping to 2 degrees Celsius the long-term increase in average global temperature.”

From everything we’ve read in recent years about China’s insatiable thirst for energy, you might think the world’s No. 2 economy is going even bigger into coal than renewables, but that’s not the case, at least according to the IEA. The agency predicts that China’s share of global coal consumption will actually shrink a bit from 2011 to 2035.

China’s leadership has made energy a top priority. In 2011, the nation’s 12th Five-Year Plan set a goal of reducing energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product by 16 percent in the five years through 2015.